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At the age of just sixteen, Team 17 CEO Debbie Bestwick was facing one of the most important decisions of her life. She was doing her A Levels, needed some funds for the summer holidays and there were two jobs in Nottingham that she was interested in: one in a fruit-and-veg store, and one in a video games shop. She’d fallen in love with video games age 12 – ever since playing Football Manager on her brother’s Spectrum – so the prospect of working with them felt, in her words, like “heaven”. She left the world of vegetables behind... we all make sacrifices.

“I never went back to finish my A Levels,” Bestwick tells me. “I fell in love with the games industry. One thing about a retail environment – I didn’t appreciate it at the time – but it’s direct to consumer. Direct to your audience. There’s no better learning experience when you’re trying to understand what people’s expectations are. This was a new form of entertainment and it was taking over.”

Not long after taking her part-time job, the manager of the shop quit and she was offered the job in his place. Within 12 months, Bestwick negotiated sale of the company to an entrepreneur based in Wakefield, West Yorkshire. The entrepreneur, Michael Robinson, had a retail chain called Microbyte across the UK and a superstore in Broadmarsh shopping centre, Nottingham. Bestwick, tucked away in her little indie shop, was building up a strong and loyal customer base, and the superstore couldn’t pry her customers away.

Team 17 CEO Debbie Bestwick

“The only thing they could do was shut down the shop, promote me and say ‘whatever you’re doing there, go do it on our other stores,’” she remembers. “They moved me to promotions manager for the retail chain, which ended up having stores on Oxford Street in London, all the way up to the Metro Centre. We won indie retailer of the year. We were the first people that had loyalty membership schemes. We had our own games magazine for customers.”

Speaking to Bestwick, you can tell she’s still proud of her early achievements. In Team 17’s Nottingham office, the CEO has a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles trophy sat proudly on her desk. She won it for selling half-a-million units through one of the stores. There’s also a faux Oscar just beside it, awarded for Retailer of the Year from Atari’s distributer. Next to that, there’s a photo of the first ever game Team 17 shipped: Full Contact, an Amiga fighter with the most wonderful jump animation you’ve ever seen.

Microbyte’s owner, Michael Robinson, also owned 17-Bit Software, which produced shareware demos. “He had a retail chain and access to all the talent, creating demos across Europe,” Bestwick explains. “He said, ‘why don’t we make our own games, we’ve got our own retail stores’. It was like having your own App Store.”

Full Contact, Team 17's first game

These days this sort of thing is common: you’ve got companies like Half-Life developer Valve Software, who owns Steam; The Witcher developer CD Projekt RED, who owns GOG; Electronic Arts, who owns Origin; and Ubisoft, who owns Uplay. The rest of the industry is finally catching up with what Bestwick and co attempted back in 1990, where it was unheard of. Bestwick was asked, along with 17-Bit’s Martyn Brown, to form the new company, Team 17.

“We were a startup,” she exclaims. “There were only three of us.” Back then, Team 17 had no internal development team – instead it worked with talent from outside the company, like Andreas Tadic and Rico Holmes, creators of Amiga classic Superfrog.

“It was all bedroom coders,” she continues. “It’s very similar to what you’re seeing today in terms of a startup mentality: hard work. Sometimes we’d be in the office until 2am and back for 7am. There were three of us, but the day-to-day stuff was handled by myself and Martyn predominantly. We had teams making games wherever they were, and we were working with them along their milestones. QA back then... No wonder our games are rock hard. I mean, seriously – two people!

“You’d be doing QA, marketing your game, while selling to your distributors across Europe, doing the press. And then, once orders were in – the games was finished and everything was nailed – box copies have to go out. We were packing the bloody things in the warehouse.

“Everyone’s always like ‘Alien Breed sold amazing’, and I’m like ‘yeah’, and they’re like ‘can you remember how it sold?’ I reply ‘oh yeah!’,” she laughs. “We were pulling our mates in.” To put this into perspective, Alien Breed sold 750,000 copies.

Alien Breed

Obviously working this way has had a huge impact on Bestwick’s work ethic. To this day she rarely takes a break, and sees work as part of her lifestyle, not an interruption. “I hate laziness,” she tells me, not long after she’s just driven from Nottingham to Wakefield to meet me. “I don’t use that word often: hate. You’re privileged to be working in the games industry. I love my industry and I feel very protective, not only about my teams that I work with, but also our industry as a whole. I can’t imagine any other world. I’m probably a bit obsessive at times. I don’t like seeing potential not reached.”

It’s not an empty statement. Bestwick thrives off building things up, always chasing that high she felt when she took a small games store and made it worth something. She’s always looking to improve things, to put them where they’re supposed to be. Bethany Aston, the PR executive who is sitting in on the interview, started life in QA for Team 17. She emailed Bestwick to say that she was interested in working in the marketing side of the business and she now runs the company’s UK PR. I think, perhaps, this is because Bestwick knows what happens when things are not where they should be. This was something she soon learned.

“We’re 25 years old,” Bestwick says. “We started life as a publisher. We started to build internal development around ‘93. We were incredibly successful. Every single game that we shipped on Amiga went to number one. People talk about Worms, but between 1990 and 1993, at one point, we had 52% of the UK market share. We picked up joint Publisher of the Year at the Golden Joysticks, along with Electronic Arts. People don’t know this side of Team 17. That’s who we were.”

However, it all changed when Andy Davidson, the creator of Worms, turned up to a trade show Team 17 was attending, disc in hand. “Back then we had Amigas all around – it’s a bit like your PAX and your Rezzed,” Bestwick remembers. “Everyone was talking about PlayStation coming, the amazing graphics. Then this game comes on – in Worms, the pixels are [tiny]. It’s like ‘what the hell?’. Then we started playing and we couldn’t leave it alone.”

They offered to help Davidson sell his game. It was written in coding language BlitzBasic, not feature complete and needed about six-nine months polish on top, so Davidson made the move to Wakefield. This was the beginning of what Team 17 calls its ‘incubation program’ where the publisher moves developers over, puts them up, integrates them with the larger team and collaborates.

“It’s much better now,” Bestwick tells me. “You’re taking somebody young and moving them to a town away from home for the first time ever. He lived in a hotel. It wasn’t great. We were working stupidly hard. When people ask me if I’ve ever done crunch, I say once in my life and never again. This was an Amiga game. We knew we had something. We had only ever published on open platforms like the Amiga and PC. Closed systems, or consoles, we hadn’t published on. It was incredibly expensive, back in those days. We needed a partner on console and we spoke to a number of publishers.”

The original Worms

In the end, Team 17 worked with Ocean Software to put Worms on console. The deal would see them port the game to ten platforms in the space of six months.

“We all survived,” Bestwick laughs. “We’re all friends still. Development is a strange thing. When you’re in games development, you’re very in sync, you’re completely closed off to the world and what is going on around you. You’re not just work mates, you’re living a life together. You’re people, at the end of the day. These are my friends. They’re my family. We’ve grown up together. Nobody asked us to work seven days a week. If you talk to a developer that’s making something special – they have a feeling. We knew it with Worms. Everyone wanted to play it.”

Bestwick says this is the first sign to look for in a hit game. If your developers, marketing and QA are playing it on their lunch breaks or when they go home, despite working on it, you’ve probably got something special. Worms was special. In fact, it was the first Team 17 title that sold multi-million units. In 1996, across mainstream media, Worms even had twice as much press coverage as Tomb Raider and FIFA. Ocean Software’s sales director forecast 60,000 units on PlayStation, yet Worms smashed that projection, selling two-million on Sony’s console alone.

“Yes, we had to cut deals to get it on a bigger stage, but it was hugely successful,” Bestwick says. “Every award possible, it won.

“That’s when things started to change. We forgot who we were. We forgot about the company that was working with teams all around the world.”

Team 17 became the Worms studio. “Whenever we’d talk to people, they’d only ask when the next Worms game was coming,” explains Bestwick. “Especially after the first game – everyone was asking when Worms 2 was coming.”

Worms 2 skipped console, as it was twice the size of the first game and Team 17 wasn’t confident it could be ported. It didn’t return on console for another four years, returning in a blaze of kamikaze glory with Worms Armageddon.

“Armageddon exploded, and then we had to do more,” she continues. “We fell into that trap. Worms is a fabulous franchise, it’s the foundations that allowed us to build the label, but I do wonder what would have happened if we’d continued doing all these different titles. We released something like 30 games in three years, none of them Worms. But that’s what happens when you have success.”

Worms Armageddon

Six years ago, Bestwick decided it was time for a change and she bought out Team 17’s founders, taking over as CEO and bringing along some experts from outside the industry to help with the transition. The previous model was what Bestwick calls a “yoyo studio”, which sees a big finance spike when a game releases, followed by a plummet as they develop the next game in the series over a couple of years.

“This is not healthy and it’s not healthy for our industry,” Bestwick states. “I wanted to change what we were. Previously I’d been a minority shareholder with very little influence – I was more on the commercial side, dealing with publishers. So I brought in a guy, my partner in crime that never gets any recognition, Paul Bray. He’s my finance operations director. He’s the boring one that people don’t like to write about. He’s an accountant, but he’s the coolest accountant in a games company.

“I’ve grown up in this industry, I spent my life with games developers and spent my life around every aspect of our industry, and whilst creativity has to be handled in the right kind of way and has to be allowed time to nurture, you still need a process. So I ignored everyone's advice and went outside the games industry and recruited. Paul was finance director at some huge corporation. He could be an FD in any business. I convinced the poor guy to take a huge pay cut, come and work in the games industry and help me build something special.”

The first two years of this new regime were spent fixing things. Once it was all done, the company was again sustainable, profitable and business was good. The problem was, Bestwick was bored. At the time, she was helping her friend Shahid Kamal, who was building Sony’s indie program for PlayStation, giving him advice on working with indie teams. That was when it hit: it was time to go back to the studio’s roots.

“Let’s go full circle,” Bestwick tells me her thoughts at the time, “let’s take them back to what they were doing in the first place. I wanted to build the kind of publisher that would do the things that nobody would do for me before as Team 17. A lot of publishers are only interested in what you’re doing right now. They don’t care about where you’re going to be in five-ten years time, or what your next game is. In all my time working with publishers, never once did one ask me what our vision was for Team 17. It’s the first question I ask.”

Team 17 was already ahead of the curve at this point. The publisher already had its hands in digital distribution, a method of retail that’s climbing in popularity while traditional brick and mortar retail stores are slowly declining. In 2007, the original Worms launched on Xbox 360’s online marketplace, Xbox Live, and sold another two-million units. Again, in 2009, the classic Team 17 game landed on the mobile App Store and sold another four-million copies.

“We were very much in that digital world already,” Bestwick explains. “The one thing about digital is you can make great games, but actually publishing these days is retailing – you’re selling direct to a consumer now. It was a world that I’m incredibly comfortable in.”

It wasn’t just Team 17 that had gone full circle, going back to its roots, but Bestwick too had found this new place that allowed her to tap into her past experiences. She wasn’t bored anymore, and everything was where it should be, right down to that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles trophy.

The Escapists

“The Steam front page is a storefront, with the popular stuff and the front and the older stuff at the back,” Bestwick says. “It’s floor space. The way that retail works is it’s zoned. People come into your store, you offer great customer service. People talk about games as a service and customer retention. With The Escapists, I’ve lost count of the amount of free updates we’ve given. A lot of this, again, is that retail experience that keeps coming back. It’s about service, it’s about quality. It’s about personal feel and approach.”

The Escapists was the the first game Team 17 published as the new label, and it was a huge success. Bestwick felt like Team 17 had to prove itself, because people see Worms as an easy sell. So every night, as she still does to this day, she trawled the web looking for the next big thing. Scouting crowdfunding sites, eventually she came across the Kickstarter page for The Escapists. There wasn’t even a video with the developer, Chris Davis, in – it was barebones, but it was a game that excited Bestwick, with its throwback visual style reminding her of the games she used to play in her early teens. She needed to find out where Davis was based.

“So I backed him,” she remembers. “Best £100 I’ve ever spent in my life – that tier let me track his contact details down. It turns out he lives twenty minutes from me. So I emailed him, explaining that I’m starting this games label... ‘this is who we are, this is what we do – you’re only down the road, can we meet for a coffee?’ I even said I could meet him in Derby. I said ‘I can do Monday if you can’. He came back to me and said, ‘sorry no, I can’t do it, I’m meeting my mates’.”

Being a tenacious talent scout – so much so that some of her colleagues call her Simon Cowell – Bestwick didn’t leave it there. Her and Davis ended up chatting on the phone, and she discovered he was a fan of Superfrog. Sensing an opportunity, she offered him a tour of Team 17. He drove straight up to Wakefield. While it’s maddening to think Davis nearly missed his shot, he was a roofer by trade and resided in the games industry on the periphery, not keeping up with the ins and outs of the business.

Bestwick told him to bring the latest build of The Escapists along to the tour – she was a backer, after all. “We sat in a room downstairs and he pulled out his laptop – it was the oldest laptop I’ve ever seen in my life,” she laughs. “The Escapists was completely written on it.”

Playtonic's upcoming platform adventure, Yooka-Laylee, which Team 17 is publishing.

Gathered on the bottom floor with a collection of Team 17 veterans, Davis showed off his game on his battered computer. One of the people in the room suddenly piped up, asking, “So, how do you escape?” Davis hadn’t figured that out yet. This was a game called The Escapists that had no escaping. Debbie told him, “Don’t worry, dude, we’ll figure that out.” He signed up to the label the following week, and Team 17 helped him with everything, even creating his company logo.

The game sold over one-and-a-half million copies.

The publisher has since managed to bag a deal that let them make a The Escapists spin-off using The Walking Dead license, and it’s now a successful brand – one which Team 17 recently acquired for an undisclosed sum.

Davis wasn’t the only Team 17 success story to come from a humble background, either. Team 17’s incubation program has helped a bunch of talented developers break into the industry. Survival management game Sheltered saw its developers move from Shrewsbury, Shropshire, to Wakefield, quitting their jobs the day they got the publishing deal – one worked in a DIY store, while the other worked in a cinema. They’re now full-time games developers. Sherida Halatoe, developer of the dreamlike Beyond Eyes, moved across from the Netherlands. In the run up to E3 she was so nervous that Bestwick had her to sleep at her house for the weekend. Halatoe left with her hair dyed blue.

The next big release for Team 17 is Playtonic’s Yooka-Laylee. A development team made up of 3D platforming veterans from UK studio Rare, these developers require a bit less looking after than new blood, with Team 17 instead taking away as many distractions as possible so the studio can focus on making the game. In Team 17’s Wakefield development studio, the in-house developers are handling the conversions for PS4 and Xbox One, for example.

Well-received kitchen party game Overcooked is just one of Team 17's recent successes.

“We have a great portfolio of titles, Overcooked is doing very well, along with the Worms IP, The Escapists IP, then there’s Yooka-Laylee,” Bestwick says enthusiastically. “We’ve got a great portfolio, but I want to do more.” And that’s just what she’s going to do.

Bestwick received an MBE for her services to the British games industry in the Queen's Birthday Honours list earlier this year, which is surely better than its agricultural equivalent. Even more recently, Team 17 received a £16.5 million investment from Lloyds Development Capital. This sum will allow Team 17 to have more presence on the world stage, taking the business international and getting its games in front of more people.

It started with an indie games shop in Nottingham but, for Debbie Bestwick and team, the next stop is world domination. Wherever the journey takes them, though, Bestwick won’t ever forget where she came from, and Team 17 is all the better for it.